Latest Breaking News

There is an app to verify how many fake followers they have.

Have you ever looked at your favorite Atlanta food media outlet’s number of Twitter followers and wondered, “how can their social following be so big?” Are they faking it? Are they some how padding their followers?

The truth is, it is very easy to increase your number of Twitter followers. All you have to do is purchase fake followers that are sold by black hat purveyors of dishonesty, at low low prices. But the vast majority of legitimate media outlets do not engage in this type of twitter stuffing for very simple reasons: it does not result in website traffic, it gives them a false sense of how well they are doing, and ultimately violates the trust readers have in them should they find out. And P.S., it is REALLY easy to find out.

So, as a public service, we have done the research for you by running the top Atlanta food media outlets through Status People’s “Fakers” tool, a web-based app that checks if your Twitter followers are real or fake, to identify how many of their followers are real and how many are fake.

Many of the media outlets reading this are probably not aware that their social following is not entirely comprised of real fans.

Here’s why:

Everyone, including @WhatNowAtlanta, is a victim of follower-bots. These bots are phony accounts that act like real people, sending out tweets, retweeting content, and even following other tweeps. If you are on Twitter, you have undeniably been followed by a questionable looking egg or received spammy tweets about free merchandise, porn, and other random shenanigans. As a matter of fact, over 10 million Twitter accounts are fake, according to Variety.com.

The graph above, generated by Status People, demonstrates how many of your favorite food media have a diluted social following.

Understanding the fakers score:

Fake: these are the follower-bots we were talking about. Block these suckers ASAP to avoid getting spammed.

Inactive: these are tweeps who have not tweeted in awhile or at all. They have abandoned Twitter altogether, or they just use Twitter to read what the tweeps they are following are tweeting.

Good: these followers are active Twitter followers who are engaging in all-things Twitter everyday.

This has been a great exercise for us at WNA because we do not like the idea that spammers are, unbeknownst to us, creating fake accounts and following us. By the way, we have over 25,000 followers. Well, to be fair, 25,000 less the follower-bots (stats are based on a sample size of 1,000 followers.)

In an effort to decrease the number of fake accounts following WNA, we have started flushing out the bot accounts (Status People offers this as a service for a few bucks per month.) We have since blocked those profiles, so the next time you run our numbers, our fakers stat should theoretically be close to, if not zero.

Happy tweeting!

Screenshot courtesy of Fakers.StatusPeople.com.

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW!

Subscribe to our breaking news alerts.

We hate spam. Your email address will not be sold or shared with anyone else.

I think the companies that are buying fake followers should be help liable by their advertisers. Most of the big media have real fake followers. I have NEVER bought a follow – we show 1% fake with over 28,000 followers at @ATLANTA_DINING and I will put that up against any other twitter account.

Joseph Jojo Somerville This is our 29,000 follower account @atlbizretweet ZERO FAKE – inactive may mean no tweets for 30 days http://fakers.statuspeople.com/Fakers/Scores @johnnyshideaway 11,000 followers ZERO fake we own the account along with @horseradihatl 1% fake with 17,000 followers- it can be done – 1% or 5% ok – it happens but 10% or more something is seriously amiss.